In a new tutorial posted to PHPMaster.com today, Lukas White talks about using the Browscap functionality to do server-side device/client detection in your applications.

An alternative solution to the problem is to use server-side device detection and then take certain actions based on that information. One possibility is to simply forward requests for a mobile site to a different URL. Another possibility is to adapt the layout - or indeed content - programmatically as it's generated on the server. Taking a server-side approach is the basis of this article, which looks in detail at the Browser Capabilities Project, or Browscap for short, to provide the information on which to base these decisions.

He starts with some of the basics - User-Agent strings that most devices will send to your site and their structure. He then talks about the Browscap project and the PHP support for its use. He shows how to get it all installed via Composer and how to use the "browscap-php" library to get the current browser information. He includes an example of the output and shows how to use this to redirect the user to a mobile site if needed. He also adds in a bit at the end about using it for layout switching or for showing the user the correct download links based on their client.